1. Field of the Invention
The present technology relates to a television (TV) receiver set with TV phone functionality added thereto, which is arranged to have a video telephone call enabling means to thereby make it possible to perform video/voice-based telecommunication with another machine. This technology also relates to a TV phone system using videophone function-added TV receivers of this type.
2. Description of the Related Art
A telephone communication system and TV broadcast system are independently established systems. Traditionally, a telephone equipment and TV receiver set are quite different apparatuses. In cases where a telephone receives an incoming call and generates a ring sound or melody (calling sound) signaling the incoming call, a called party fails to hear this sound from time to time. A technique for avoiding this risk is disclosed, for example, in JP-A-5-56190. With this technique, a telephone is communicatively connected by a signal transmission line to a TV receiver, wherein the TV receiver is arranged so that upon receipt of an incoming call at the telephone, the TV receiver displays a phone call arrival message on its display screen.
Alternatively, a video telephone apparatus is also known, which is arranged to enable a user to make a phone call with a distant party at the other end of a line by transmission and reception of video images and voices. This type of videophone typically has a camera, microphone, loudspeaker and image display device and is designed to transmit toward the distant party's videophone video and voice signals that are obtained by the camera and microphone of the videophone on the self side, receive video and voice signals from the distant party's videophone, and display this video by the image display device while reproducing the voice by the speaker. In a case where transmission is done to the distant party's videophone, a video image and voice are subjected to compression processing (encoding) for transmission while simultaneously performing expansion processing (decoding) of a video and voice that are received from the distant party's videophone, and reproducing them at the image display device and speaker (for detail, see JP-A-9-83983).